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I’ve been listening to bunch of podcasts recently, and want to share some episodes I think readers of this blog might enjoy.

Anyone interested in the study of terrorism needs to give Talking Terror a shot. It’s hosted by John Morrison, Director of the Terrorism and Extremism Research Centre at the University of East London, and focused both on the phenomenon of terrorism itself and on the academic field of terrorism studies. Each guest is asked about their own research and research by others that has strongly influenced them. Most of the guests are quite critical of aspects of terrorism studies, as many scholars are, but also optimistic about where the field is heading. I find it a fascinating and refreshing podcast. My favourite episodes are:

Episode 1: Laura Dugan“John and Laura discuss the origins and iterations of the Global Terrorism Database (GTD), her research on moving beyond deterrence in Israel, and Armenian terrorism.”

Episode 4: Bart Schuurman“This episode covers a range of issues including the evaluation of Dutch re-integration programmes, the role of public support in terrorism and counter-terrorism, and the individual rationales for involvement in Dutch jihadist groups.”

Episode 5: Erica Chenoweth“Erica discusses a range of topics relating to her research and her influences. Included within this is a fascinating discussion of how Zlata’s Diary had a huge influence on her career… Erica’s career has focused on analysing political violence and its alternatives, and this is reflected in her discussion with John.”

Episode 11: John Morrison“John Morrison has left the host’s chair, replaced by Andrew Silke, and for one episode only is the guest on the show. In this interview John discusses how his early interest in sports psychology still influences him today, his research on splits in Irish Republicanism, and his current focus on the role of trust is the psychology of terrorism.”

Also, the Blogs of War podcast, Covert Contact, has been doing a great run of episodes with Australian guests, covering issues like terrorism, warfare and information security. I’ve collected them all here:

Here is a quick round-up of Australian terrorism-related news over the past month or so:

Yesterday five people were sentenced in the New South Wales Supreme Court over a terror plot which targeted police officers in late 2014. All five (Sulayman Khalid, Jibryl Almaouie, Mohamed Almaouie, Farhad Said and an unidentified juvenile) had pleaded guilty, either to the conspiracy itself or to related offences such as making documents or sourcing firearms. You can read their sentencing here.

One of their co-conspirators, Ibrahim Ghazzawy, had pleaded guilty earlier and been sentenced on 8 May 2017. Read his sentencing here.

Another man in Sydney, Tamim Khaja, pleaded guilty to planning a terror attack, with potential targets including Parramatta Court.

By my count, this means that of thirteen alleged terror plots foiled in Australia since September 2014, six have now resulted in guilty pleas.

An Australian teenager has been arrested in Lebanon, suspected of trying to join Islamic State.

The US extradition of suspected Islamic State support Mirsad Kandic has revealed new information about the recruitment of Melbourne teenager and suicide bomber Jake Bilardi. See Kandic’s indictment and detention memo.

Someone in Melbourne was recently unsuccessful when trying to challenge ASIO’s cancellation of their passport.

The latest Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) annual report is out. One odd thing is that it doesn’t mention how many passports ASIO have cancelled over the last financial year, unlike almost every other ASIO annual report.

The Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security (IGIS) annual report is also out.

The Independent National Security Legislation Monitor (INSLM) has three new reports out, all as part of its Statutory Deadline Reviews. These cover:

First, I am co-authoring a book on the history of terrorism and counter-terrorism in Australia since the 1960s! I am extremely excited by it. My co-author is Debra Smith (author of this great article), and it will be published by Palgrave MacMillan.

In less exciting news, I recently withdrew from the University of Melbourne. However I have not ended the PhD, I will resume it at Monash University. About halfway through last year my primary supervisor (David Malet, who does excellent work on foreign fighters) left Melbourne University for a position at George Washington University. I took a Leave of Absence after that, initially planning to resume my PhD there if I could find another supervisor in my area, but decided instead to return to Monash. I successfully applied and will continue my PhD there, beginning in early 2018.

The book will be my main focus for the next six months, before returning to the PhD. I will be working on a few other things in that time, such as my job at APO and some pieces of writing.

Also, my podcast with Kate Grealy will be returning. We went on hiatus again and will recommence once we have a bunch more episodes ready to go. We’ve recorded some new interviews recorded, one on militias in Indonesia and one on the role of space technology in the US-Australian alliance, and have several more planned.

I’ve also had some new articles out:

an article published today in CTC Sentinel about the alleged terror plot in Sydney, foiled in July, which involved the targeting of an aircraft and an attempt to build a chemical device;

In other news, some colleagues of mine have some new pieces of research out. Pete Lentini has authored this new article (paywalled) on the Melbourne-based terrorist cell disrupted by Operation Pendennis in 2005, The Neojihadist Cell as a Religious Organization: A Melbourne Jema’ah Case Study. Michele Grossman has co-authored this study on Community Reporting Of Violent Extremist Activity And Involvement In Foreign Conflict. It’s a UK-based replication of an Australian study, which makes it particularly important as it helps terrorism studies to address the Replication Debate.

I also want to share some of what I’m reading at the moment. For the book, I’m revisiting a lot of books on Australia’s Security history:

I’m reading a bit on the Vietnam War. I just finished Thomas Richardson’s Destroy and Build: Pacification in Phuoc Thuy, 1966-1972, which I would put in the top five books ever written on Australia’s role in Vietnam. I’m currently reading a novel on the war and its aftermath, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathiser:

I’m about to start Mark Hamm and Ramon Spaaij’s book on lone wolf terrorism. The term “lone wolf” tends to evoke a lot of sarcasm now, and while I’ve had problems with how loosely the term can be used, it’s not a meaningless concept. These types of terror attacks deserves serious study, and this book looks like a rigorous and empirically-grounded example of that:

I like to balance these sort of micro-level studies with big-picture reading on world history, or on where the world may be heading. The most interesting thing I’ve read recently like that has been Amitav Acharya’s article After Liberal Hegemony: The Advent of a Multiplex World Order, and I’ve just begun Lawrence Freedman’s The Future of War: A History:

That’s it for now, but I hope to update this blog a bit more frequently. We will see!

In March last year, I wrote that Australia was seeing an emerging online strategy-sphere. It’s now grown well past the point where it can be considered “emerging”.

That post discussed how, in the mid-to-late 2000s when the US had tens of thousands of troops deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq, an online network developed of soldiers and civilians who debated military operations and strategy. My post suggested that Australia was starting to see something similar, and gave the following examples:

The Australian Army has started its own blog, the Land Power Forum, with contributions from many active members. As Danielle Cave points out, despite it being a government blog the posts are not simply puff pieces. There are of course firm boundaries set though, with the about page stating “Land Power Forum is not designed to re-litigate issues that have already been discussed and decided upon.”

Army Major Clare O’Neill has a website called “Grounded Curiosity”, including a blog and a podcast, which “aims to start a conversation with junior commanders about our future in warfare.”

Army Major Mick Cook has started a podcast called The Dead Prussian (referring to Clausewitz), which “aims to explore War and Warfare through discussion and analysis of military theory, historical events, contemporary conflicts, and expert interviews.”

With the creation of ASPI’s Strategist in 2012, and the Land Power Forum in 2014, Australia’s institutional blogs now feature much more discussion of military strategy than before (though strategy has always been part of the discussion on the Lowy Interpreter since 2007), with both civilian and military contributions.

There have been many more developments since then. For example:

Lieutenant Colonel Tom McDermott and others have created a new online resource, The Cove, which describes itself as “a professional development resource for the Australian Profession of Arms. It is designed to help military professionals sharpen their skills, connect with peers and allies, and develop new concepts and ideas for consideration.”

Another organisation has also been created, the Postern Association, which is “the Australian Army’s new association for professional development”. It doesn’t seem to have a website yet, but these four posts (one, two, three, four) help explain what it is.

Army Major Mick Cook now has a second podcast, co-hosted with Rich Thapthimthong, called War for Idiots. Their review of Netflix’s War Machine is a good place to start.

The Army now has its own official podcast, called The Australian Army Training and Doctrine Podcast, to “explore all aspects of training within the Australian Army. From international large-scale exercises to individual training activities, find out how the men and women of today’s Australian Army work towards professional excellence.”

The term “strategy-sphere” was borrowed from this Tanner Greer post about the American version of this scene. I don’t know if the participants in the Australian initiatives I’ve listed above would consider themselves part of a “strategy-sphere”, or what other term they might use to describe their online community. But I find value in the term because it conveys how their focus is not primarily on the broad political questions of the wisdom or justice of particular wars, alliances or foreign policy decisions (though these can be considered questions of “grand strategy”).

Instead they mainly discuss questions of military strategy, operations and tactics, including issues such as leadership, logistics, training and technology. These online discussions tend to be practitioner-focused rather than policy-focused, which makes sense. Many of those involved are serving soldiers, who don’t decide whether wars should be launched but have to fight where elected leaders choose to send them.

But I’m finding this strategy-sphere (which does overlap with the activities of some of the above institutions, there isn’t a firm divide) particularly interesting, because it’s a much newer addition to Australia’s online national security discussions.

We weren’t seeing this five years ago (the earlier post discussed some of the reasons why), but Australia now has a substantial online community focused on military strategy and operations, including the voices of serving soldiers. It has gotten much bigger in just the past year, and I’m enjoying watching it grow.

This case study shows how the 2015 Anzac Day terror plot resulted from virtual planning, which is an operational method the Islamic State has used widely since 2014. The article traces how the Melbourne-based perpetrator received online instructions on four components of the intended attack: choosing targets, making tactical preparations, maintaining commitment, and ensuring publicity. The article demonstrates the importance of the concept of virtual planning for understanding Australia’s current terror threat and examines aspects of the plot, particularly the involvement of a UK-based juvenile, valuable for understanding the Islamic State’s ability to initiate violence in Australia and elsewhere.

I also discussed virtual planning, and some other aspects of the IS threat, last week on Radio National’s The World Today.

Joe Ilardi has written an article on the Melbourne-based terrorist cell disrupted by Operation Pendennis in 2005, based on interviews with an undercover police officer who befriended the cell’s leader:

On 10 October 2004, an improvised explosive device was detonated in bush land in the vicinity of Mount Disappointment on the outskirts of Melbourne, Australia. A relatively small device, it was assembled and detonated by one of the two men present, a Victoria Police officer and undercover operative known as Security Intelligence Officer 39, or SIO39. The other person was the leader of a homegrown terrorist cell, who in the months preceding had assembled a group of a dozen individuals who became the subject of Australia’s largest counterterrorism investigation known as Operation Pendennis. This article, which is based on in-depth interviews with SIO39, provides unique insights into a range of activities and behaviors peculiar to this cohort. Commencing his association with the group early in its development, SIO39 was privy to some of its key evolutionary stages, from a collection of individuals meeting more or less in the open, to a clandestine body that clearly harbored terrorist intent and undertook a number of overt acts to advance its violent objectives.

Pete Lentini has also written a new article on this terrorist cell, taking a sociology of religion approach, which should be published this year:

Participation in political violence draws on identities and world views that have been shaped and influenced by emotion. This article uses data drawn from interviews conducted with 15 former members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army to highlight some of the ways that emotion is intertwined with decisions to use violence in pursuit of a substate political goal. Six themes emerge that help to demonstrate how participant’s emotional lives have helped to build the identities, beliefs, and motivations that have led to violent acts. The study illuminates how the experience, elicitation, and management of emotions played an integral role in the participant’s trajectory towards violence.

This is a largely US-focused discussion, and a really engaging and enjoyable one. Two people from this video have now taken up some prominent new roles. The panel chair, Erin Simpson, now co-hosts the podcast Bombshell. One of the speakers, H.R. McMaster, is now the National Security Advisor for the Trump Administration and has become increasingly controversial.

Panel held at the Georgetown University Center for Security Studies’ Future of Terrorism conference .

Speakers: Richard English, Gary LaFree, and Arie Perliger.

The first talk in this video, by Richard English, is excellent. He starts by highlighting the three regularly cited dilemmas in the field: the lack of a consensus over the definition of terrorism, the supposedly stark divide between “orthodox terrorism studies” and “critical terrorism studies”, and the critique that the field has stagnated. But he quickly points out why these dilemmas matter less than they may appear to. He points out there’s plenty of common ground between different terrorism definitions and between the best scholars from the field’s “orthodox” and “critical” variants, that these sorts of contestations aren’t unique to this field, and that the concerns over “stagnation” are overstated. He then moves on to many more serious problems in the field, particularly a five-fold fragmentation between different methodological approaches.

Then Gary LaFree talks about statistical data-gathering in terrorism studies, and different ways the data can be used, such as to find “microcycles” in terrorism. He also talks about how all the different datasets are going to be linked with each other more, and how this could provide stronger evidence about which counter-terrorism measures work best, and how important social media is becoming for research. Then Arie Perliger talks about some of the core conceptual dilemmas involved in attempts to “profile” terrorists.

But I enjoyed Richard English’s talk the best, as I strongly agree with him about terrorism studies needing to move beyond some the debates that have bogged it down for so long, and with his warnings of new dilemmas emerging. If you don’t have time to watch the video, read this article of his here (paywalled unfortunately).

The final video looks at the development of knowledge on one particular brand of terrorism: al-Qaeda and its affiliates.

What did scholars and policy makers know about al-Qaeda and Affiliated movements before 9/11? Part 2

Panel held at the Conflict Records Research Center’s 9/11 10 years Later: Insights on Al-Qaeda’s Past and Future Through Captured Records conference.

I want to highlight a quote from Cindy Storer, a former al-Qaeda analyst in the CIA. She was part of a group of mainly female analysts (referred to as “the Sisterhood“) who were warning before 9/11 that al-Qaeda wasn’t being taken seriously enough.

In one part of the video, Storer reflects on her experiences with academics, which unfortunately weren’t positive. She suggests that academics failed to appreciate the al-Qaeda threat before 9/11, and that this fed into the reluctance in upper CIA and government levels to listen those analysts who warned of the impending danger.

Before 9/11, we tried to reach out to academia a lot, and it was hard because, nobody studied al-Qaeda. There were people who were very good understanding of terrorism. Bruce Hoffman, Martha Crenshaw, a lot of people like that we reached out to. And we were able, especially from Martha Crenshaw, to learn a lot about in general how terrorist groups work, how terrorism comes about, so to be able to put al-Qaeda into this broad context of being a terrorist organisation. But since nobody was really talking about al-Qaeda itself, comments that academics made on al-Qaeda itself generally were counter-productive. Because again, we [al-Qaeda analysts in the CIA] were a small community, we were women in an operational environment, and so it was really easy to ignore us frankly. Because people wanted to anyway, Hezbollah was the important issue and Iran and all of that, so people in the agency tended to look to “outside experts” more than to us. And when those outside experts hadn’t studied the organisation they’d say things like “well I assume it’s XYZ based on my study of whatever happened in the 1980s or the 1970s” and it was just wrong. It was wrong. And it gave people a false comfort, I think, on the policy and upper management levels, that they weren’t dealing with anything significantly different. So, that was a problem.

Now, if you had been able to marry up, that broader understanding of issues with the details that people can see in the intelligence community of an emerging threat of an emerging issue, then wow, what you could have done earlier would have been spectacular. But there are all these barriers that counter cooperation, not least of which is the restrictions placed on academics who get access to classified material. It just doesn’t work very well. And we need to find a way to do something about that problem. I should also mention there were journalists. Honestly a lot of our early outreach efforts, in terms of what we would like to read, were journalistic efforts. People on the ground seeing what was happening.

I found this interesting because academic discussions about whether to engage with the policy world sometimes start from the assumption that academics have valuable knowledge which government officials need, and less often reflect on the risk that they will provide misinformed advice and have harmful policy impacts.

It’s also interesting because terrorism scholars are regularly accused of overstating terror threats, but on some key occasions they have tended tounderestimate threats, and this video suggests that academic assessments of al-Qaeda prior to 9/11 are another example (though there is rarely uniformity in the field).

Its these sorts of issues, which all of the videos touch on, which most interest me. They go to some of core questions in this area that need to be regularly reflected on:

How can academia best contribute to national security policy and practice?

Should academia even try to influence national security policy and practice, or should it not try to play any such role at all?

When might academia harm people by providing intellectual cover for unjust government actions carried out in the name of national security?

Or alternatively, when might academia harm national security by giving ill-informed advice?

There was a lot of terrorism-related news in Australia over the past week. Here is a quick round-up:

A co-conspirator behind the murder of NSW Police employee Curtis Cheng (by 15-year old Farhad Jabar) has pleaded guilty to a terrorism offence.

Musa Cerantonio and four other Victorian men, accused of attempting to leave Australia by boat to join an Islamic State affiliated group in the Philippines, have been committed to stand trial.

The brother of Khaled Sharrouf has been charged for allegedly resisting arrest when raided over suspicions he was violating a Firearms Prohibition Order. Khaled Sharrouf was involved in the terror plot foiled by Operation Pendennis in 2005, and after being released from prison he joined Islamic State engaged in highly public war crimes.

The inquest into the death of Numan Haider (a teenage Islamic State supporter shot death when stabbing two police officers) is nearing its end. Members of the Victorian Joint Counter-Terrorism Team contend that ASIO failed to pass on crucial information about the threat Haider posed.

It was announced that the 600-page report of the inquest into the Lindt Café siege in Sydney will be released next Wednesday. Four Corners will air a two-part special on the tragedy, beginning next Monday.

The Independent National Security Legislation Monitor held public hearings on Friday for its review of “Division 3A of Part IAA of the Crimes Act (Stop, Search & Seize powers); Sections 119.2 and 119.3 of the Criminal Code (Declared Areas); [and] Divisions 104 and 105 of the Criminal Code (Control Orders & Preventive Detention Orders)”. ASIO’s Director-General and the AFP’s deputy commissioner for national security spoke there, as did many legal figures and academics. A transcript should be on the website soon, and submissions to the review can be found here.